Guy sounds WAY obsessed. Personally, I prefer my Portobellos grilled in
Teriyaki Sauce. :)
From: http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/11/25/mushrooms/index.html
(Available to everyone, not just subscribers)
Jon
GSV Good In Omelettes Too
Excerpt:
How mushrooms will save the world
Cleaning up toxic spills, stopping poison-gas attacks, and curing deadly
diseases: Fungus king Paul Stamets says there's no limit to what his spores
can do.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Linda Baker
Nov. 25, 2002 | Once you've heard "renaissance mycologist" Paul Stamets
talk about mushrooms, you'll never look at the world -- not to mention your
backyard -- in the same way again. The author of two seminal textbooks, "The
Mushroom Cultivator" and "Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms," Stamets
runs Fungi Perfecti, a family-owned gourmet and medicinal mushroom business
in Shelton, Wash. His convictions about the expanding role that mushrooms
will play in the development of earth-friendly technologies and medicines
have led him to collect and clone more than 250 strains of wild mushrooms --
which he stores in several on- and off-site gene libraries.
Until recently, claims Stamets, mushrooms were largely ignored by the
mainstream medical and environmental establishment. Or, as he puts it, "they
suffered from biological racism." But Stamets is about to thrust these
higher fungi into the 21st century. In collaboration with several public and
private agencies, he is pioneering the use of "mycoremediation" and
"mycofiltration" technologies. These involve the cultivation of mushrooms to
clean up toxic waste sites, improve ecological and human health, and in a
particularly timely bit of experimentation, break down chemical warfare
agents possessed by Saddam Hussein.
Fungi are the grand recyclers of the planet and the vanguard species in
habitat restoration," says Stamets, who predicts that bioremediation using
fungi will soon be a billion-dollar industry. "If we just stay at the crest
of the mycelial wave, it will take us into heretofore unknown territories
that will be just magnificent in their implications."
A former logger turned scanning-electron microscopist, Stamets is not your
typical scientist -- a role he obviously relishes. "Some people think I'm a
mycological heretic, some people think I'm a mycological revolutionary, and
some just think I'm crazy," he says cheerfully. His discussions of mushroom
form and function are sprinkled with wide-ranging -- and provocative --
mycological metaphors, among them his belief that "fungal intelligence"
provides a framework for understanding everything from string theory in
modern physics to the structure of the Internet.
In a recent interview, Stamets also spoke mysteriously of a
yet-to-be-unveiled project he calls the "life box," his plan for "regreening
the planet" using fungi. "It's totally fun, totally revolutionary. It's
going to put smiles on the faces of grandmothers and young children," he
says. "And it's going to be the biggest story of the decade."
Statements like those make it tempting to dismiss Stamets as either
chock-full of hubris or somewhat deluded. But while many academic
mycologists tend to question both his style and his methods, Stamets' status
as an innovative entrepreneur is hard to dispute. "Paul has a solid
grounding in cultivation and has expanded from that base to show there are
other ways of using and cultivating mushrooms than just for food," says Gary
Lincoff, author of "The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American
Mushrooms." "These are relatively new ideas ... but Paul's got a large
spread where he can have experiments going on under his control. And he's
getting big-name people to back him."
An advisor and consultant to the Program for Integrative Medicine at the
University of Arizona Medical School and a 1998 recipient of the Collective
Heritage Institute's Bioneers Award, Stamets has made converts out of more
than one researcher in the mainstream medical and environmental communities.
"He's the most creative thinker I know," says Dr. Donald Abrams, the
assistant director of the AIDS program at San Francisco General Hospital and
a professor of clinical medicine at the University of California at San
Francisco. Abrams says he became interested in the medicinal properties of
mushrooms after hearing one of Stamets' lectures. Stamets is now a
co-investigator on a grant proposal Abrams is authoring on the anti-HIV
properties of oyster mushrooms.
Jack Word, former manager of the marine science lab at Battelle Laboratories
in Sequim, Wash., calls Stamets "a visionary." Stamets takes bigger, faster
leaps than institutional science, acknowledges Word, who, along with Stamets
and several other Battelle researchers, is an applicant on a pending
mycoremediation patent. "But most of what Paul sees has eventually been
accepted by outside groups. He definitely points us in the right direction."
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